


How They Were

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-03-23 12:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3768685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carolina tries not to think of them dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How They Were

She tries not to think of them dead.

This is something people say: “Remember them how they were.” A coping mechanism. So she does not think about Maine’s body sinking like lead in the freezing water, anchored to a couple tons of Warthog. She does not think about what it looks like from beneath the ice, no matter how vividly she can imagine it.

She does not think about Maine in the same way she does not think about York bleeding out with an armor-piercing round through his heart, about Tex leaving his body there in the sun at the empty sim base by the sea.

She does think, sometimes, about how Maine loved the cold, how he and Wash used to fight over the temperature of their room and how he’d blow out the cooling units in his armor every other mission by overtaxing them and how he took icy showers after training. She does remember how York loved the sun and the beach and shore leave in warm climates.

The problem is that even avoiding the obvious rabbit trails, there are threads in every memory. If not specifics—massive hands that one day found their way around her throat, gleaming blue plasma rifles that would one day end up aimed at a friend—then threads of feeling, little tugs of unease that wove themselves all through Freelancer. They don’t need to carry her to a frozen cliff or a sunny shore. There are other places.

And though she does not think of them dead, as much as she can avoid it, thinking of them alive takes her back to other places.

It comes back to the four of them, somehow, strangely. Maine and Wyoming were not friends as far as she knew and yet when she probes her memories she sees them frequently in the same frame. York and Tex were not friends as far as she knew—until the end.

Yet they were all four of them brought together, that day, the day things began to change in ways she felt like a shift in gravity, just strong enough to set her off balance, without knowing why.

An impromptu match, three against one, black armor and a name not on the roster. Every other time, there was a new name on her list, then a new recruit. This time different. No warning at all.

_Who do you think gave them the ammo?_

Even in her dreams, she still hears herself shutting them all up, telling Wash to can it, South to quit running her mouth, CT to watch it. In her dreams, none of them look at her. In her dreams, she stands apart from herself watching herself snap at her teammates, feeling unsteady, like the floor is moving. She hears the live fire echo on the other side of the glass and feels that tightness begin in her chest like the air’s been sucked right out of the room and she knows there’s something she’s supposed to figure out before it’s too late, but the noise is all too much, and she can no more find it than can her double staring intently at the glass, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her past self doesn’t know everything is already beginning to unravel, that the miniature sun that bursts from the grenade (thrown from Maine’s hand, passed from Wyoming’s hand, given by whose hand?) is only the beginning of an unstoppable nova that’s going to swallow them all. She can’t warn herself. She can’t warn Maine, before he throws the grenade. She can’t warn York,  _don’t help her_. She can’t warn any of them.

She feels the pull of the threads inexorably from how they were to what they became.

_But you had choices. You made yours._

They all made choices.

After she left York in surgery she found Maine in the weight room. She remembers standing in the doorway before he looked up, watching him lift. Massive discs of iron against the artificial gravity of the ship and him caught between. She did not know whether to be angry, whether to reprimand, what to say at all. Protocol had something to say about what a team leader should do in the event of one agent injuring another but there were too many loose ends. An accident? He had meant to throw the grenade, if not at York. An order? Who do you think gave them the ammo.

It’s one of those moments she can get stuck in, a knot in the thread of memory that she cannot skate past. There are so many of these. Moments she could not tell, at the time, where she was being pulled, and sinking back into them she finds herself, even now, at a loss.


End file.
